Trump's Bad Math: The GOP Can't Win With White Voters Alone

When experienced Republican strategists analyzed the results from Romney’s loss their advice was clear. Republicans’ own “autopsy report” explained that the party could only hope to compete in 2016 by opening its doors to greater minority engagement. Republican primary voters dismissed this insight. They responded by defiantly nominating Donald Trump.

If the rambling wreck of the Trump campaign can be said to have a strategy, it seems to center on a myth from the 2012 race. A faction on the right responded to the party’s advice with an alternative idea.

Many of the same minds devoted to “unskewing” 2012 polling data are now convinced that Republicans can win with a hardened racial appeal. Their plan is to convert Democratic voters in critical Rust Belt states by transforming the GOP from a party of affluent suburbanites and urban professionals into the political engine of working and lower-income whites.

Proponents of this strategy somehow overlooked changes in their own party over the past few decades. This conversion of the Republican Party into the primary vehicle for populist white nationalism already happened and its political value is utterly spent. Trump’s strategy suffers from more than a moral weakness. It has a math problem.

We are supposed to believe that Democrats win the votes of America’s poorest, most aid-dependent voters and Republicans are the party of the “makers” and “job-creators.” This is not reflected in the data. Republicans are already the party of lower-income white voters. There are very few new votes for Republicans to win with a stronger focus on their concerns.

Dig deeper into the data and the troubling drivers behind modern partisan affinity become apparent. America’s most aid-dependent counties share certain characteristics that might explain their voting patterns. They are overwhelmingly white, Southern, and rural. In fact, 86 of them are in areas that did not outlaw slavery prior to the Civil War and 81 of them are majority white. Of those 81, Romney lost only four. Three of those four are in the North. He lost only one county on that list which was both majority white and Southern (Elliot, KY), and he lost there by 60 votes.

On the other end of the spectrum, Obama won half of the nation’s fifty wealthiest counties. Though Democrats generally performed well in higher-income areas, Obama lost every one of the 50 wealthiest counties which were located in the South (if you exclude Virginia’s DC suburbs – not exactly the heart of Dixie).

Narrow the focus to critical battlegrounds like Pennsylvania and the Republican demographic trap becomes clearer. Trump is counting on big wins among lower-income enclaves in the center of the state as if that were a novel strategy. Romney already won Pennsylvania’s ten poorest counties, most with more than 60% of the vote, while losing the state decisively. Not coincidentally, every one of those ten poorest counties is rural and at least 95% white.

This reflects a pattern seen across the country in the 2012 results. Republicans long ago ceased to be the party of “job creators,” wealth, and innovation. Republican electoral success now depends on three, ranked demographic criteria:

1) Region – The single highest indicator of success for the GOP ticket was region. Republicans won reliably in sections of the country in which slavery was legal until Lincoln’s election.

2) Urbanity – The lower the overall population density, the more successful the GOP ticket.

Where these factors were at tension with one another, as in Harris County (Houston), the outcome was muddled. Houston is Southern, urban, and ethnically diverse. Obama scored a narrow win there, also winning Texas’ other big cities by modest margins.

Meanwhile in counties that are rural, Southern, and majority-white Romney racked up margins often topping 90%. Apart from those three criteria, outcomes appear to be almost completely unaffected by poverty rates, welfare, food stamps, or any other socio-economic factors.

Democrats are no longer the party of the poor and Republicans no longer represent America’s affluent. Republicans are now laser focused on the concerns of aging, mostly Southern and rural voters frightened by the country’s growing pluralism. Democrats depend on an unstable and often contradictory default coalition that can increasingly be described as simply “everybody else.” Race, region, and urbanity, in that order, now determine the outcome of our elections. The white nationalist territory Trump is trying to mine is already played out.

The Trump campaign has problems that go deeper than math. He could cost Republicans multiple future elections. By adopting an overt white nationalist appeal, he has doubled down on failure. His rhetoric may have sealed off the party’s only escape hatch from their self-constructed demographic trap. White nationalist appeals that were once subtle are now an inescapable feature of the Republican identity. Trump’s bad math could haunt Republicans for a very long time.